• September 28, 2006: Bailey, Colorado: Duane Morrison, 53, entered Platte Canyon High School and shot and killed one girl, and sexually assaulted 6 others. Antidepressants were found in his vehicle.
• March 21, 2005: Red Lake Indian Reservation, Minnesota: 16-year-old Native American Jeff Weise was under the influence of the antidepressant Prozac when he shot and killed nine people and wounding five before committing suicide.
• April 10, 2001: Wahluke, Washington: 16-year-old Cory Baadsgaard took a rifle to his high school, and held 23 classmates and a teacher hostage while on a high dose of the antidepressant Effexor.
• March 22, 2001: El Cajon, California: 18-year-old Jason Hoffman was on two antidepressants, Effexor and Celexa, when he opened fire at his California high school wounding five.
• March 7, 2000: Williamsport, Pennsylvania: 14-year-old Elizabeth Bush was on the antidepressant Prozac when she blasted away at fellow students in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, wounding one.
• May 20, 1999: Conyers, Georgia: 15-year-old T.J. Solomon was being treated with a mix of antidepressants when he opened fire on and wounded 6 of his classmates.
• April 20, 1999: Columbine, Colorado: 18-year-old Eric Harris was on the antidepressant Luvox when he and his partner Dylan Klebold killed 12 classmates and a teacher and wounded 23 others before taking their own lives in the bloodiest school massacre to date. The coroner confirmed that the antidepressant was in his system through toxicology reports while Dylan Klebold’s autopsy was never made public.
• April 16, 1999: Notus, Idaho: 15-year-old Shawn Cooper fired two shotgun rounds in his school narrowly missing students; he was taking a mix of antidepressants.
• May 21, 1998: Springfield, Oregon: 15-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his own parents and then proceeded to school where he opened fire on students in the cafeteria, killing two and wounding 22. Kinkel had been on Prozac.

US drug company knew that ‘Prozac could lead to violence’

CONFIDENTIAL drug company documents appearing to suggest a link between a popular anti-depressant and suicide and violence…

Antidepressants a Problem? We’re Shocked!

Six years after Kip Kinkel, dosed up with Prozac, killed his parents and two students at Thurston High, in Oregon; five years after Eric Harris, dosed with Luvox, embarked on his day of slaughter at Columbine; well over a decade after naysayers, including Dr. Peter Breggin, the Scientologists and this columnist, raised the alarm about links between antidepressants and violence, the FDA has issued a warning that ten antidepressants can cause deeper depression and, for gosh sakes, even agitation, mania and other forms of violent behavior, even SUICIDE! Who says government doesn’t work?

SSRI Antidepressants & Violence

GlaxoSmithKline’s data from all of their placebo-controlled paroxetine trials showed “hostility events” (which includes mere thoughts as well as actions) in a total of 60 out 9219 paroxetine cases (0.65%) and 20 out of 6455 placebo cases (0.31%). Statistically, one appears to be twice as likely to have an “hostility event” on Paxil than on placebo.

Psychiatric Pharmaceutical Industry Cover Up

Cho Seung Hui is Potential 19th School Shooter Taking Violence-Inducing Psychiatric Drugs–While Pushing for Brave New World of Mandatory “Treatment”

While the families of the victims of the Virginia Tech (VT) massacre begin the process of grieving and recovery of their tragic loss and the nation searches for answers to yet another senseless school shooting, the psychiatric-pharmaceutical cartel is working at a frenzied pace, deflecting media and government attention away from the facts: Cho Seung Hui was reported to have been prescribed “depression” drugs. If so, Hui is the 19th school shooter reported to have been taking psychiatric drugs since 1988, when Prozac, the first in the new class of antidepressants linked to suicide and violent behavior hit the market.

Are meds to blame for Cho’s rampage?

Cho Seung-Hui’s murderous rampage – during which he killed 32 students and faculty members at Virginia Tech – is prompting research into gun laws, resident aliens and graphically violent writings. Investigators also may want to check his medicine cabinet, because psychiatric drugs have been linked to hundreds of violent episodes, including most of the school shootings in the last two decades.

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Antidepressants and Violence:
Problems at the Interface of Medicine and Law

In 1989, Joseph Wesbecker shot dead eight people and injured 12 others before killing himself at his place of work in Kentucky. Wesbecker had been taking the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant fluoxetine for four weeks before these homicides, and this led to a legal action against the makers of fluoxetine, Eli Lilly [1]. The case was tried and settled in 1994, and as part of the settlement a number of pharmaceutical company documents about drug-induced activation were released into the public domain. Subsequent legal cases, some of which are outlined below, have further raised the possibility of a link between antidepressant use and violence.

ZOLOFT AND VIOLENCE FACT SHEET

I think we have to come back to the issue of efficacy. We have I think very strong evidence of harm and really not very good evidence of efficacy, and although I know many practitioners are convinced that these drugs work, if you look very closely at the [Prozac] trial, just as an example, at the Childhood Depression Rating Scale, the improvement with placebo was 19 points, and the improvement with the drug was 23.4 points. You bring people in, you start a medication, and you see an improvement, you are very, very likely to believe that the drug is effective, and the reason why we do randomized, double-blind trials is because personal experience, however compelling, is not a reliable way to tell whether drugs work. In the study where they worked, in the [Prozac study], the improvement over placebo was really very, very small, and I would say not detectable by a clinician treating individual patients. …

Suicidal and violent behavior associated with the use of fluoxetine

The paper by Teicher et. al. paper described six depressed patients “free of recent serious suicidal ideation who developed intense, violent suicidal preoccupation after 2-7 weeks of fluoxetine treatment”. The authors estimated that the risk of developing violent suicidal preoccupation on fluoxetine to be 3.5% with a 95% CI (1.3%-7.5%). These findings were alarming, given the high estimated frequency of occurrence and the severity of this adverse effect.

The idea of suicidal action occurring early in the treatment of depression was not new. Detre and Jarecki (1971) described the “rollback phenomenon” in which suicidal ideation may reemerge during pharmacological treatment of severe depression. This idea was paralleled by the observation that severely depressed patients may not have the energy or initiative to act on suicidal thoughts until partial recovery occurs with the initiation of antidepressant medication.(4) In fact, the incidence of suicide attempts in depressed patients is approximately 15%, and SI can be expected to occur in as many as 90% of depressed patients.(5)

What was new was the idea that classes of antidepressants could differentially influence the occurrence of suicide. That fluoxetine might be associated with such an effect was particularly disturbing since its marketing focused on its unique status as an antidepressant agent with significantly fewer side effects (and toxicity) than earlier drugs including tricyclic (TCA) and monoamine oxidase inhibitor antidepressants (MAOI).

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Risk Of Violent Behavior With Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors And Antidepressants

Use of one class of antidepressant drugs, the SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), may be associated with severe violence in a small number of individuals say the authors of paper published in PLoS Medicine.

Antidepressant/Child Suicide Risk Slim

“These medications appear to be safe and effective for anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and depression,” Brent tells WebMD. “The number of people likely to be helped is much larger than the number likely to develop some suicidal response to treatment. In our opinion, the risk/benefit ratio is favorable.”

The Drug Connection – Antidepressants and Violence

Julian Whitaker, M.D., believes there is a direct link between the violent shootings and the increased and indiscriminate use of popular antidepressant drugs. Dr. Whitaker points out that many of the gun-related massacres that have made the headlines over the past decade have a common thread: they were perpetrated by people taking Prozac, Zoloft, Luvox, Paxil, or a related drug.

The Real “Mental Health Lessons” from Virginia Tech

So what was needed? Police intervention. Almost certainly, the police were hampered in taking appropriate actions by being encouraged to view Cho as a potential psychiatric patient rather than as a perpetrator. It’s not politically correct to bring criminal charges against someone who is “mentally ill” and it’s not politically correct to prosecute him or to remove him from the campus. Yet that’s what was needed to protect the students. Two known episodes of stalking, setting a fire, and his threatening behavior in class should have been more than enough for the university administration to bring charges against him and to send him off campus.

Police need to be encouraged and empowered to treat potentially dangerous people more as criminals than as patients. In particular, men stalking women should be handled as definitively as any perpetrator of hate crimes. Regardless of whether the victims want to press charges, the police should. Cho shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with it a second time.

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Republicans for Black Empowerment

For over 40 years black voters have staunchly aligned themselves with the Democratic Party on Election Day. However an increasing number have begun questioning the wisdom of supporting social policies rooted in low expectations and government dependency, economic policies that stifle job creation, personal savings and investments, and education policies that prevent parental choice in school placement. Republicans for Black Empowerment has the mission to raise awareness of the benefits offered by conservative solutions to the black community’s concerns.

Supporters Rallying Around ‘Zoloft Killer’

Supporters are rallying around a teenager who killed his grandparents and blamed the antidepressant drug Zoloft. Every week, Janet Sisk rises as early as 5 a.m. and drives nearly 100 miles to spend her Sundays with the boy who was just 12 when he murdered his grandparents in their sleep.

FDA: Antidepressants risky for young adults

Treatment with antidepressants increases the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior in patients age 24 and younger, according to proposed changes to the drugs’ labels unveiled Wednesday by federal health officials.

Paxil Maker Held Liable in Murder/Suicide

For the first time, a jury found a pharmaceutical firm liable for deaths caused by a patient taking an antidepressant. A federal jury in Cheyenne, Wyo., ordered SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) to pay $6.4 million to relatives of Donald Schell.

Schell, 60, had been taking Paxil for just 48 hours when he shot and killed his wife, his daughter, his granddaughter and himself.

Antidepressant Makers Withhold Data on Children

Makers of popular antidepressants such as Paxil, Zoloft and Effexor have refused to disclose the details of most clinical trials involving depressed children, denying doctors and parents crucial evidence as they weigh fresh fears that such medicines may cause some children to become suicidal.

The companies say the studies are trade secrets. Researchers familiar with the unpublished data said the majority of secret trials show that children taking the medicines did not get any better than children taking dummy pills.

Although the drug industry’s practice of suppressing data unfavorable to its products is legal, doctors and advocates say such secrecy distorts the scientific record.

“Conflicts of interest and the company control of the data have thrown out the scientific method,” said Vera Hassner Sharav, a critic of the drugs and a patients’ rights advocate. “If hundreds of trials don’t work out, they don’t publish them, they don’t talk about them.”

Use of Antidepression Medicine For Young Patients Has Soared

Even after 10 years of Prozac, however, the psychiatric field remains divided. Counseling is considered crucial, but there are worries that doctors are being pushed to prescribe drugs too quickly for a growing variety of ailments from depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders to even extreme shyness. Already, many complain about pressure from health maintenance organizations in favor of relatively low-cost drugs over counseling and hospital stays.

“We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much”

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction”

“Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.”

“To sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last — but eat you he will.”

“Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.”

- Ronald Reagan

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The New Soldier
by John Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against the War

“MUST HAVE” PDFS
Supreme Court Nominations 1789 – 2000

Sociology and Classical Liberalism
by DANIEL B. KLEIN AND CHARLOTTA STERN

Still Losing the Race?
by John H. McWhorter

Antidepressant Casualties

Could Antidepressants Explain the Virginia Tech Massacre?

A variety of news sources have reported that Cho Seung Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter who killed 32 students and faculty members in a shooting rampage, was taking antidepressant drugs.

Antidepressants have also been used by the perpetrators of previous and similar acts of violence, including the shootings at Columbine High School eight years ago.

There are known links between antidepressants and violent acts. Research on the drug Paxil found that more than twice as many people taking it experienced a serious “hostility event” as did those taking a placebo. In the United States, labels for all antidepressants note that anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, and mania are all possible side effects.

Experts say antidepressant drugs cause suicides instead of preventing them

In June 2001, a jury in Wyoming determined that the antidepressant drug Paxil caused a man to kill his wife, daughter and granddaughter before killing himself. The jury awarded the surviving family $8 million in damages, according to American Medical Publishing’s Prescription Medicines, Side Effects and Natural Alternatives.

In Portland, Ore., Jay Johnston followed his doctor’s orders and took the prescribed antidepressants Zoloft and Prozac. He then attempted suicide with a shotgun, permanently disfiguring himself. In the same month as the Wyoming jury’s decision, Johnston sued his doctor for not properly monitoring him. The jury found the doctor guilty of criminal negligence and awarded Johnston $5 million, reports Dr. Ann Blake Tracy in Prozac: Panacea or Pandora. Similarly, who could forget Eric Harris, who — along with Dylan Klebold — killed 11 people and then himself in the Columbine school shooting? At the time of the shooting, Harris was being treated with the prescription antidepressant Luvox.

These patients are among the growing statistics of people who committed suicide, or tried to commit suicide, while undergoing treatment with prescription antidepressants.

“The man is on the Court. You know, I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease. Well, that’s how I feel. He is an absolutely reprehensible person.”
– USA Today columnist Julianne Malveaux on Justice Clarence Thomas, November 4, 1994 on PBS To the Contrary.

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FDA Reviews Adult Antidepressant-Suicide Link

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Prozac linked to child suicide risk

Prozac, the only antidepressant certified as safe for children, may make kids more suicidal, according to evidence out Monday.

A large new study added to previous research on Prozac shows that kids taking the drug have about a 50% higher risk of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts than those getting placebos, says Robert Temple, director of the Office of Drug Evaluation at the Food and Drug Administration.